Ok, but you can understand the difference between approaching a game and a business software

Now, you are understandably more concerned about your network environment, but the majority of VG customers are more concerned with the game working out of the box; TQ has a strong multiplayer component and, like many other games, does not use separated EXEs for SP and MP; I can only imagine the amount of fuss to the support staff from the users if, by default, the developer had decided to turn off MP until explicitly enabled in the options... yes, people are lazy, but still they have already being warned by the box/store page that the game has MP, so why should it be OFF?

So, i would not call that bad QA nor a bad design decision, just a standard practice for a game that's very clearly advertised as having multiplayer

There are tons, and I mean TONS, of softwares, games or otherwise, that do network connections at startup without a previous acknowledgment, be that for update checking or network discovery or whatever, so I'm not exactly sure why this one stands out for you... it's the very reason you, and me too for that matter, use personal firewalls after all

My firewall has alerted me twice within the last couple of years, once for Renowned Explorers, and once for Titan Quest, both within the last couple of months (a new trend?). I have many SP/MP games installed, they all behave well, i.e. they don't affect my firewall, keep the connectivity modules separate from the rest, and have a separate start / options menu entry for MP functionality and settings. Why can these guys do it, and the TQ guys can't?

OK, as far as I'm concerned, there is no need to continue this discussion. The most important result (for me) is that TQ very likely doesn't transfer data from my PC to whatever external server.

Alright, let's agree that we have different opinions on that matter (or different priorities/perspectives). And yes, I highly doubt that TQ is transfering data anywhere without being prompted to.

Thanks for the civil discussion by the way, which is not really a given on the internet these days...

That sounds like a problem with everything else, but not with TQ (Norton...*cough*). Seriously though, chances are that Norton blocked the TQ executable for whatever reason. Just unblock it from within Norton and it should work again (maybe reinstall it if stuff really got deleted).